MUSIC

MUSIC; A Rare Hearing for a Strauss Opera That Nearly Vanished

By MICHAEL P. STEINBERG

Published: January 16, 2000

A CONCERT performance of Richard Strauss's ''Liebe der Danae'' (''Danae's Love'') by Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra this afternoon at Avery Fisher Hall offers a rare hearing of the last of the composer's operas to take the stage.

It was not the last opera Strauss wrote; that was ''Capriccio,'' completed in 1941 as an elegy to opera itself and given its premiere in 1942. ''Die Liebe der Danae'' was completed in 1940 and destined for the Salzburg Festival. But a week before the premiere, scheduled for Aug. 12, 1944, in honor of the composer's recent 80th birthday, the festival and all theaters in the German Reich were closed. The order came from Goebbels as part of a decree of total mobilization two months after the Allied invasion at Normandy. The conductor, Clemens Krauss, who was devoted not only to Strauss and the work but also to himself and his wife (the soprano Viorica Ursuleac, who was to sing Danae), nevertheless managed to hold a full dress rehearsal before an audience of invited dignitaries and wounded soldiers.

The premiere of the opera, which Strauss himself referred to as ''posthumous,'' took place in Salzburg in 1952, three years after his death. Apart from a notable production in Munich in 1967, the work has virtually disappeared.

With ''Capriccio'' and ''Arabella'' now in the repertory of the Metropolitan Opera, ''Intermezzo'' a hit at the New York City Opera and ''Die Agyptische Helena'' performed two years ago by the American Symphony, Strauss's late operas have become more familiar. (Missing from the repertories of most opera houses are ''Die Schweigsame Frau,'' ''Friedenstag'' and ''Daphne.'')

''Helena'' and ''Arabella'' still have texts written by the poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Strauss's collaborator from the days of ''Elektra'' and ''Der Rosenkavalier.'' Hofmannsthal died in 1929, and Strauss never found a worthy successor. The late operas also suffer in reputation from two other problems: the modernist-driven myth of Strauss's decline from avant-garde genius to mannered mediocrity, which the composer himself partly credited, and the vexed political context of Germany under the Third Reich, between 1933 and 1945.

The facts of Strauss's relationship to the Nazi regime are at once clear and incoherent. His political and ethical persona remains perhaps the most opaque aspect of a life rendered generally inscrutable through a combination of genius and banality.

Strauss served the Nazi regime as president of the musical section of the Ministry of Culture but resigned under pressure in 1935, in part because of his choice of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew, to succeed Hofmannsthal as librettist for ''Die Schweigsame Frau.'' Despite having worked with Zweig, however, he signed his name to the infamous group letter that stripped Thomas Mann of his honorary citizenship of the city of Munich. And in later years Strauss honored the regime whenever he was asked, conducting, for example, at the 1938 festival intended to separate ''German'' from ''degenerate'' music. In his political engagements, Strauss remained pragmatic, self-serving and insensitive -- not the qualities of an antihero but perhaps those of its modern, bureaucratic alternative.

How are we to understand the music of the late, complicated, inscrutable and compromised Richard Strauss? That there is nothing heroic about him does not, contrary to much received opinion, make it difficult to understand his heroic music. The heroic music of his youth fits squarely with the fantasy life of the bourgeoisie, for whom real heroism is simply unavailable.

The problem with this music -- ''Ein Heldenleben,'' ''Also Sprach Zarathustra'' -- is how little irony it shows with regard to its own posturing. Here Strauss learned too much from Wagner and too little from Nietzsche, whose diagnosis of Wagner as a gigantic symptom of bourgeois posturing was razor-sharp. That part of Strauss that perpetuates Wagnerian heroic posturing takes on its mantle in the newer guise of bureaucratic cruelty.

At every point in his compositional career, Strauss could lose his orchestral texture to an indiscriminate mass of moving sound in which drama and psychological nuance give way to the aimless management of machinery: the sorcerer's apprentice losing control. The music is at its worst when it becomes a symptom of banality and bureaucracy, of self-interest without selfhood. It is at its best when it becomes an ironic commentator, a satirist or even a voice of subversion against these very tendencies, sometimes with remarkable poignancy.

Strauss's open secret is that he is always a musical painter of bourgeois life. The more mythological the setting, the more contemporary the emotional vocabulary supplied by the music. The more heroic the music, the more a symptom it is of bourgeois longing. (Strauss was a hundred years more distant from Napoleon than Beethoven was, and Beethoven knew already, much to his agony, that Napoleonic glory was a cruel anachronism at the dawn of the bourgeois century.)